Things can only get better — right?

Hello and welcome to Working It.

Much of the “off the record” talk I hear about workplaces at the moment focuses on the challenge of managing and engaging younger staff. The gap between how older generations see the workplace and the expectations and ambitions of Gen Z appears to be . . . widening.

New Gallup analysis shows the extent of young people’s disenchantment with corporate life. The research is worth looking at in full but the bit that caught my eye is that “younger millennials and Gen Z employees have seen their engagement ratio fall from 3.1 to 2.5 — for every actively disengaged employee, there is only slightly more than one engaged one”.

In related news, a big UK study this week found widespread mental health conditions among young people aged 18-24, affecting their education and careers. Read on for more on the likely impacts of this crisis for workplaces — and how managers and organisations can support staff.

*It’s a shorter newsletter today because I’m heading to Hong Kong, to talk to culture-sector leaders at an International Women’s Day lunch for The Women’s Foundation. I’m also speaking at the HK literary festival about my new book, The Future-Proof Career. I’d love to see Working It readers at these events — do come and say hello 👋.

How can managers help staff with mental health disorders?

It has been dawning on me — first anecdotally, from personal experience, and now backed up with data — that there’s a shockingly high level of mental distress among the young. Why aren’t more resources and, crucially, preventive help been offered? It feels as though we have sleepwalked into this situation.

A report from the Resolution Foundation scopes out the state of things in the UK and makes some recommendations. One of the shocking headline statistics is that people in their early 20s are “significantly more likely to be economically inactive due to ill health than people in their early 40s”. That rise is because of mental ill health.

And for those looking for hard evidence that common mental health disorders (CMDs) are on the rise, the report says: “In 2021-2022 over one in three (34 per cent) young people aged 18-24 reported symptoms of conditions like depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder — up from one in four (24 per cent) in 2000. As a result, more than half a million 18-24-year-olds were prescribed anti-depressants in 2021-22.”

The knock-on effects for employers of this crisis are potentially huge. I’m struck by the mismatch between the consistently high level of CMD symptoms reported among the young and the patchy interventions and support on offer in workplaces.

What can managers do to support young workers and keep them in employment? I turned to Ryan Hopkins, chief impact officer at Jaaq, an online mental health platform and author of 52 Weeks of Wellbeing. He was one of the first people to alert me to the scandalous amounts of cash spent on workplace wellbeing programmes 🧘‍♀️ that don’t work. (See here and here for the evidence.) Let’s hope some of that cash goes towards more useful interventions for staff with CMDs — and more training for managers.

As Ryan said: “Most managers are ‘accidental’ — with little to no training — and yet they are expected to deliver at work, lead their team and act as a pastoral support. It is unthanked, unenviable and an almost impossible task. What they can do is to ask people when they join: ‘how can I help you to succeed here?’ and create space for open, honest conversations.

“They also need to get clear on what the ‘expectations’, norms, and ways of working are.”

There has to be a balance: ideally, senior staff need to be more flexible in how they support the team: “The manager may learn that ‘this is the way it has always been done’ is not a sufficient response, and perhaps we can all learn a thing or two 👂.”

Best practice to support mental health in future might include policy shifts — either on an organisational level or via legislation — such as implementing a “right to disconnect” from email or calls during the evenings and weekends. As Ryan said: “Couple flexibility with connection and a sense of belonging and this is the workplace of the future.”

Managers might also bear in mind that TikTok is where Gen Z often seek advice and guidance on mental health issues — and a lot of that content is not coming from experts. If you want to support young staff, and understand their lives, TikTok may be the best place to begin your research. And then counter it with verified, expert advice sources.

How is your organisation supporting staff with mental health conditions? Are there any TikTok mental health influencers you can recommend? And do tell us anything else you think might be useful for other readers — this crisis isn’t going away: [email protected].

This week on the Working It podcast

We all play the office politics game — and if we don’t, we are likely to find ourselves losing out in our careers. My colleague Miranda Green recently wrote an FT column about the importance of learning the “rules”, and we wanted to explore that further, so in this week’s podcast episode I had a lively debate with Miranda and John Curran, an expert in organisational culture and a business anthropologist.

John explains why we behave in such tribal ways at work, and how status is marked (think about who sits where in meetings — and who arrives late. That’s a massive status “tell”). You’ll never look at your colleagues in the same way again 👀.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. How to save HR from itself: A wildly popular column from Stefan Stern, suggesting that chief human resources officers and their teams could use more data and evidence-based interventions. (The comments are worth a read, too.)

2. The menace of the overblown job title: One of the many gems in Pilita Clark’s column about title inflation is that the biggest growth of LinkedIn job listings with the title “chief” has been among “chief growth officers”. Priceless.

3. The metropolitan elite has ignored farmers for too long: Things are bleak in the farming sector, and in Europe farmers have already started to protest and mobilise. Camilla Cavendish looks at the problems facing UK farmers.

4. The myth of the lone writer: We accept that most creative endeavour is collaborative but persist in thinking of writers working alone. Simon Kuper unpicks the truth, involving famous men and the unsung genius of their wives.

5. Wall St’s co-heads cannot co-habit: FT Alphaville looks into the strange politics of co-heads inside investment banks. At Goldman Sachs some co-heads were invited on to an important new committee — and others weren’t.

One more thing . . . 

It has been on Netflix for a couple of weeks (sorry, old news) but I’ve loved One Day, the adaptation of David Nicholls’ novel about the slow-burn friendship-turned-romance between Dexter and Emma, who meet at their university graduation in 1988 🎓.

The story’s USP is that it follows them on one day — July 15 — every year, the anniversary of their first meeting. The lead actors (Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod) are captivating, but the genius here is in the details: the series is understated and pitch-perfect in evoking a late 20th-century world without mobile phones, where landlines were everything — and where it was OK to smoke inside restaurants.

A word from the Working It community

A couple of weeks ago I asked for your workplace love stories — and here’s a wonderful one: Tanya Crispin met her now-husband Damien Brooks while they both worked out of a WeWork office in Las Vegas. They didn’t know each other until, as Tanya writes, a colleague called her one day after she’d left work: “She told me I had to come back as soon as possible because she [had] met a guy that was in marketing and loved to dance just like me. His name was Damien, and he was a WeWork member with his own marketing business.

“So I turned around and went back to the office. We introduced ourselves, got each other’s Instagrams and ended up staying at an event WeWork was hosting for a few hours. He reached out to me shortly after that to ask for my help with a dance marketing campaign and we kept the conversation going. About a month later we started dating officially.”

The couple still work out of the same office — and even hosted their baby shower there 🎁.

Who says we can’t have nice things at work 🥰 ?